This blog will post detailed news items about GLBT issues. Some of the issues include the "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and gay marriage. Please note that my main website is DOASKDOTELL.COM (link on my Profile).

Followers

About Me

Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!

Could Ebola present an existential "political" threat to gay (and straight) clubs? Trace the parallel history with HIV 30 years ago; it's chilling

Of course, it’s tempting to draw parallels to HIV and AIDS,
in several areas. Let’s plow through it.

The most immediate relevant immediate medical fact is that
Ebola remains transmissible in sperm for several months after a person recovers. It is very obvious that this concern would
apply to homosexual and heterosexual sex alike.
There is no way that Ebola could ever be a “gay disease” and speculative
right-wing arguments articulated in the 1980s (especially in a group of politicians
promoting very anti-gay legislation in Texas) about “amplification” make no
sense here. It’s a good question (even
for heterosexually married men) whether condoms offer enough protection during
this period. If anything, we're learning that novel epidemics can arise in many different communities around the world and blow up for a lot of different reasons.

There is another context, though, in which all of this is
important to much of the gay community.
I could relate my own perspective.
From 1975 through 1983, I went through a period where I “brought men
home” and sometimes went to the baths.
Since early spring 1983, I’ve “tricked” (in the conventional sense of
what that usually means) only once, and that was in Minnesota in August
1999. My last visit to a bathhouse was
in March 1983 at the Club in Dallas. (My
first had been at the Club in New York in early 1975.) As we know, in early summer 1984, the San
Francisco Health Department closed the baths (I remember being at an Oak Lawn
Softball Association party in Dallas when this was announced), and other cities
followed suit very quickly. As a
business, the bathhouse industry was destroyed.
We learned to live without it. In
its place, some “quasi hotels” opened that were much simpler facilities which
had private rooms and official (non enforced) policies of not having sex on the
premises. I have visited one of these
only once, in the 1990s. And sometimes “private
party clubs” have formed, as there were well known in DC in the 1990s.

A lot of written about the transmission of Ebola, being related
only to direct contact with body fluids.
Ebola is much more transmissible than HIV, which, as noted, explains why
it cannot ever be a “gay disease”. There
is speculative discussion as to whether it could become airborne (see my Issue
blog Oct. 16), and even, because of some unusual microbiology of infection,
whether much longer incubation periods than have been reported are possible
with very minimal exposures. This
latter discussion may help explain the draconian measures taken against some
people with very minimal risk of exposure, especially in Ohio. Again, the official line is that someone
cannot transmit Ebola until there are significant symptoms that would keep the
person out of the public anyway. Some
seem not so sure, and health officials are notifying hundreds of people (with
apparently no risk and only the most incidental contact of being on the same
airliner or business) and these people may be grounded.

The usual concept that is relevant is called “social
distancing”. That idea has been applied
mainly to airborne diseases, especially influenza and SARS/MERS. This could become important. Clubs facilitate
some intimate contact, especially discos (“dirty dancing”) in the gay community
and “straight” community alike. It is
quite plausible to imagine health departments wanting to pull dance licenses on
clubs “to protect health”. This bears
analogy to the closing of the baths three decades ago. Many clubs would not survive such a measure,
as customers would find no reason to find.
In fact, most clubs (outside a few cities like New York and San
Francisco where there are many “fern” bars with no dancing) need to offer a
climate where some intimacy happens and encouraged – intimacy which is known
(after three decades of experience) not to be particularly risky with respect to
HIV but which could turn out to be dangerous with Ebola or, more likely, a different
airborne pandemic to happen in the future.
Clubs could also face arbitrary closure if an employee or even possibly
a customer were identified with Ebola right after being on the premises
(unlikely, we think, but not impossible).
Already, some insurance companies are pondering how to underwrite such “business
interruption” and it seems so capricious when managed by governments and health
departments. We already know from
experience that once clubs are closed (and lose liquor or dancing permits),
they often find enormous political resistance to reopening, partly because many
members of the public (saying they are concerned about noise and traffic) have “moral”
objections to bars and dance halls to begin with.

There has been little coverage of this possibility in the
gay press so far. As with AIDS three
decades ago, the gay press could rightly fear that it could provoke adverse
behavior by politicians by merely talking about it, but this time, with an
Internet, the circumstances are more nuanced, and it is independent bloggers
who might wind up in the position of saying “I told you so.” The Dallas Voice this morning does have a
brief story of a candlelight vigil for the two Dallas nurses with Ebola,here. The mainstream gay press continues the
stories on gay marriage, benefits, and overseas persecution as if it were
business as usual. And of course it
must. Back in the 1980s, there were some in the Dallas Gay Alliace who thought my "objectivity" was simply putting ideas in the heads of "enemies" that they could not have come up with on their own.

Update: Nov, 2

Senator Rand Paul said on CNN on Candy Crowley's show, that the libertarianism in him opposed quarantyines, but that people who believe they could have been exposed to Ebola "shouldn't go to the discotheque, the bar, or the school cafeteria".

(Use for analytics)

Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy for billonglbt.blogspot.com

If you require any more information or have any questions about my privacy policy, please feel free to contact me by email at JBoushka@aol.com.

At billonglbt.blogspot.com , the privacy of my visitors is of extreme importance to me. This privacy policy document outlines the types of personal information is received and collected by billonglbt.blogspot.com and how it is used.

Log Files Like many other Web sites, billonglbt.blogspot.com makes use of log files. The information inside the log files includes internet protocol ( IP ) addresses, type of browser, Internet Service Provider ( ISP ), date/time stamp, referring/exit pages, and number of clicks to analyze trends, administer the site, track user’s movement around the site, and gather demographic information. IP addresses, and other such information are not linked to any information that is personally identifiable.

Cookies and Web Beacons billonglbt.blogspot.com does not use cookies.

DoubleClick DART Cookie

.:: Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on billonglbt.blogspot.com .
.:: Google's use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to your users based on their visit to billonglbt.blogspot.com and other sites on the Internet.
.:: Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy at the following link.

Some of my advertising partners may use cookies and web beacons on my site. My advertising partners include ....... Google Adsense

These third-party ad servers or ad networks use technology to the advertisements and links that appear on billonglbt.blogspot.com send directly to your browsers. They automatically receive your IP address when this occurs. Other technologies ( such as cookies, JavaScript, or Web Beacons ) may also be used by the third-party ad networks to measure the effectiveness of their advertisements and / or to personalize the advertising content that you see.

billonglbt.blogspot.com has no access to or control over these cookies that are used by third-party advertisers.

You should consult the respective privacy policies of these third-party ad servers for more detailed information on their practices as well as for instructions about how to opt-out of certain practices. billonglbt.blogspot.com 's privacy policy does not apply to, and we cannot control the activities of, such other advertisers or web sites.

If you wish to disable cookies, you may do so through your individual browser options. More detailed information about cookie management with specific web browsers can be found at the browsers' respective websites.